HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

By Johan Galtung*

23 January 2017 – TRANSCEND Media Service – And the first question to the 45th US president: Will you kill, abroad?  Predecessor Obama was in the US tradition that killed more than 20 million in 37 countries since WWII, bombing and droning.  

Johan Galtung

His Special Forces seem to have killed in 138 countries.  And a shocking majority voted for Hillary Clinton with her warfare record of even privatized warfare. Will you make America “Great” the same way?

Or make America Greater by breaking this morbid tradition?

The 22nd US Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, has summarized his experience in some statements (in Wall Street Journal 7 Jan 2017, from Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. Knopf):

Human Wrongs Watch

Spotlighting the desperate plight of millions in Africa’s Lake Chad basin, the top United Nations humanitarian official for the Sahel region called for international solidarity with the people in urgent need.

Human Wrongs Watch

ROME, Jan 25 2017 (IPS) – George W. Bush, the Republican bridge between Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump as U.S. president, declared that the United States was the only democracy in the world. The election of Trump now makes this traditional American rhetoric impossible. Trump received 3 million votes less than his opponent Hilary Clinton.

Roberto Savio

The American electoral system was born with the independence from Britain, more than 200 years ago.

These two centuries of union have formed a people united by myths, consumption and patriotism, but the constitution is untouchable, and based on the idea of protecting small states.

The result is a democratic aberration.

Each state is entitled to two senators – both Wyoming with 635,000 inhabitants and California with 39 million. The nine most populous states of the Union are home to just over 50 per cent of the total population.

Human Wrongs Watch

By Robert J. Burrowes*

DAYLESFORD, Australia, 24 January 2017 – Nonviolent action is extremely powerful.

Robert J. Burrowes

Unfortunately, however, activists do not always understand why nonviolence is so powerful and they design ‘direct actions’ that are virtually powerless.

I would like to start by posing two questions. Why is nonviolent action so powerful? And why is using it strategically so transformative?

When an activist group is working on an issue – such as a national liberation struggle, war, the climate catastrophe, violence against women and/or children, nuclear weapons, drone killings, rainforest destruction, encroachments on indigenous land – they will often plan an action that is intended to physically halt an activity, such as the activities of a military base, the loading of a coal ship, the work of a bulldozer, the building of an oil pipeline.